First Blood

Gideon Fallowes had the kind of voice that made a request sound like a favor you were doing yourself.

He walked up the nave with his hat in his hand, past the pews and the huddled survivors, and each step was unhurried and faintly apologetic, as though he regretted the trouble of the floor. His people fanned out behind him. They were competent, tired-looking, well-fed. They moved like a unit that had worked together for a long time, and each wore the silver lantern at the throat, the small bright badge she had last seen pinned to a surgeon's black coat in the corridors of the Hospice.

The Order, thought Isolde. The idea fell into her head with a small, cold click. Why would they be here?

She did not say it. She stood in front of the Harvest Queen with the brass key in her fist and the shadow ribbon on her wrist, and looked at the man in the green coat, and kept her face very still.

"Gideon Fallowes," he said. "Captain of the Lantern Company. I'd shake your hand, but you're holding something precious." The smile widened, rueful. "My apologies. I do hate to arrive in the middle of a delicate moment."

"What do you want?"

"What everyone wants. To get home." He spread his empty hand. "It's an unusual situation, Miss—?"

"Isolde."

"Miss Isolde. You've arrived at the Hollow in the middle of what we call the Gathering, and it's a nuisance, I know. Every door has a key. Every key opens a way. But only one party can use that way at a time, and the doors close quickly, and the creatures do not wait." He tilted his head toward the pews. "The Companies have an arrangement. We pool what we find. We share the passage in order of need. It prevents—" He made a delicate gesture. "—disagreement."

"By taking the key."

"By holding it in trust. For everyone."

"And if I don't want to give it to you?"

"I should be very sorry," said Gideon, and he sounded it.

Behind him, one of his people laughed. It was a short, humorless sound, quickly stifled.

Isolde looked at the sword hilts, and the dozen steady faces. She looked at Odile, white and furious in the second pew. She looked at the Harker sisters, who were holding each other and staring at Gideon Fallowes with the dazed gratitude of the drowning.

They want him to be kind, she thought. They want so badly for someone to be.

"I'm afraid I've made a prior commitment," she said.

…

"You have." He glanced at her wrist. His eyebrows rose. "Good Lord. So you have."

The ribbon of shadow had not changed. It lay in a loose thin loop round the bone, slightly cold, as a bracelet lies in a winter drawer. But the man in the green coat looked at it as one looks at a snake in the grass, and for one instant his warm face went entirely blank.

"A covenant," he said.

"Yes."

"With him."

The Overseer had not moved. He stood by the east window, a black line against the light, with his gloves on again and his arms folded, and he had not so much as glanced at the Company since they entered. But the air in the chapel had changed. It was thinner. It tasted of iron and of cold wells.

"I did not know it could be done," said Gideon softly. "Do you know, in all my years, I have never seen a Stray do it. I wonder how you managed."

"I read the fine print."

"Evidently." He studied her for a long moment. It was a different look, now: sharper, quicker, an appraisal rather than a courtesy. Then the warmth returned, easily, and he laughed. "Well. That does alter matters, doesn't it? I confess I'd rather hoped to avoid unpleasantness. Maude."

A lean gray woman in the second rank stepped forward. She had short cropped hair and a long jaw, and a scar ran from the corner of her mouth to her ear, so that she appeared to be smiling a grim smile on one side only. Isolde did not like her at all. She had the flat, practiced look of a person who has done terrible things for reasons that seemed sufficient at the time.

"Captain."

"Please take the key from Miss Isolde. Gently."

"No," said Isolde.

"My dear, it isn't a request."

Maude Ferrier took two steps. Valerian did not stir. Isolde thought, wildly: Now. Now, now, and nothing happened, and she remembered the second clause and its careful wording: any creature, rule, or hand that would do her violent harm. A hand reaching for a key was not violent. It was perfectly polite.

I wrote the loophole myself.

Maude's fingers closed on her wrist.

They were strong, and dry, and they pulled. The key came out of Isolde's grip with a wrench that made her cry out, and Maude stepped back with it in her palm and tossed it once, lightly, in the air.

"There," said Gideon. "That wasn't so—"

Posy screamed.

…

It was not the scream that did it.

It was the sound beneath it.

He had been standing against the window for the whole of the parley, quiet, a part of the wall, with his thoughts folded into a small neat box as he had learned to fold them. He was good at it. He had become very good, over all the years of the Doors. He could stand through the death of forty strangers with the box shut. He had no need to open it.

But the girl had screamed, and under the scream there had been another noise: a small, high, breaking sound like a bird's wing in a cat's mouth.

One of the Company had taken the child by the hair.

He was a thick man with a red neck. He had dragged her into the aisle and set a knife under her chin, in order, presumably, to focus the discussion. It was a crude bit of leverage. Gideon would not have approved of it. The thick man looked round, grinning, pleased with his own initiative, and the girl's feet kicked off the floor, and her sister cried out in a voice that carried the grief of an entire family, and Valerian felt the box open.

It did not open the way a lid does. It opened the way a tooth cracks.

Something rose in him. He had been warned of it. He had been told, long ago, by a voice he could not now place, that it would come: a sort of cold, bright, pressing appetite, from the bottom of the dark, that wanted to be let off its chain. He had never wanted it. He wanted it now. He was dimly aware that he was crossing the chapel, and that the floor ran past under his boots like water, and that the shadows in the long room had stopped being shadows.

They were hands.

They came up out of the flags and the pews and the folds of the Company's cloaks. They were long and black and without thumbs. They took the thick man at the wrists, and the elbows, and the neck, and the knife dropped from his fist and rang on the stone, and the girl fell out of his grasp like a doll. She hit the floor and rolled away. The thick man's mouth opened wide.

"Please—"

He was lifted. He hung in the air, three feet above the aisle, with his boots swinging and a ring of black fingers round his throat, and he looked at Valerian. His face was gray and wet. His eyes said what they all said. They said: but you don't interfere.

It was the second clause. It was Isolde's clause. Her voice was in his head, with its dry and careful grammar: Wholly, without reservation or delay.

He closed his hand.

The thick man came apart quietly. It was not bloody. It was something stranger: a folding, a tearing-in, a tightening of the dark, like a sheet being wrung. Then there was nothing in the aisle but a heap of cloth and a lantern pin that rolled in a slow circle on the stone.

The chapel was very still.

He turned his head. The rest of the Company had drawn their swords. They stood in a line, white about the mouth, and not one of them took a step. He felt the black hands stir at his shoulders, hungry, hovering, eager for more. He could have taken them all. He could have done it with a thought. It would have been the easiest thing he had done in a hundred years.

It was extraordinary how much he wanted to.

"Valerian."

The voice was small, and clear, and dry. It was not afraid.

He looked down.

She had come up beside him in the aisle without his noticing. She was standing at his elbow, small and square and ink-stained, with her notebook clutched to her chest, and she had not looked at the pile of cloth. She was looking at his face. In the light from the window her eyes were green-gray and absolutely level.

"That's enough," said Isolde.

He stood there with the dark dripping from his hands.

And something in him that had been rising stopped, as a tide stops, and hung.

…

"Gideon," said Maude Ferrier.

She hadn't moved. She still held the brass ear in her left hand. But her right had gone to her sword, and her scarred face had turned the color of tallow, and she was staring at the Overseer with a look that Isolde could not at first identify. It was not fear. It was something nearer to recognition, as if she had been shown a portrait of a man she once knew.

"I know that look," she said.

"Maude, be quiet."

"It's him. It's the same one. After all this time he's still—" She laughed. It was a high, cracked noise. She drew her sword, and the Company stirred, and Gideon said sharply, "Don't be absurd," but she was past hearing. "Ninth Cycle," she said. "Ninth! And you're still here? You really don't remember me, do you?"

Valerian turned his head.

"Look at me," said Maude. "I was your Warden. Eleven years, the third time. You taught me how to bind a wound with a belt." Her eyes were bright. "You liked me."

"I do not know you," said Valerian.

"No." She gave a little sob of a laugh. "No, you wouldn't, would you? It never stays. Bless you. It never stays."

She lunged.

It was clumsy. It was not the lunge of a fighter; it was the lunge of a person who has decided to be killed. The black hands took her, and she did not scream. She dropped the key, and it spun across the flags and fetched up against Isolde's shoe, and Maude Ferrier hung in the air with a surprised, intent expression as the shadows closed.

"Tell the Prioress," she said, to nobody, in a conversational voice, "that he's better."

Then there was only the sound of folding.

…

It was Gideon who spoke first.

He had not drawn his sword. He stood in the nave with his hat still in his hand and his golden head bowed, like a man at a funeral, and when he looked up his face was full of sorrow. It was a perfectly real sorrow. She would remember that afterwards.

"I am sorry for that," he said. "I did not intend it. Maude was—" He stopped. "Maude had a difficult history with the Overseer. I ought to have known."

"You sent her to take the key."

"I sent her to ask for it. I confess that I was not clear." He put on his hat. "I see now that I misjudged you, Miss Isolde. You are rather more than you appear. I think we shall meet again."

"I hope not."

"Oh, but we shall." He smiled, and it was the old warm smile, and it was the worst thing she had seen yet. "Don't think too ill of us. We're all doing our best. Come along."

The Lantern Company filed down the nave. They went past her with their swords sheathed and their eyes lowered, bearing the heap of gray cloth between them as carefully as a stretcher, and they did not look at the Overseer. At the door, Gideon paused.

"Nell Harker," he said, over his shoulder. "Miss Harker. Posy. I believe you were both at the Hospice. I can offer you a place with us. Warm food. Fifteen swords. Real protection." He glanced at the black-gloved man by the window. "Not that you aren't in excellent company, of course."

Nobody moved.

Isolde turned. The Harker sisters were standing in the aisle where the child had fallen. Posy's face was white, and her braid was half torn out, and the shape of a knife-point showed as a red dot under her chin. Nell had both arms round her. She looked at Isolde. Her long plain face worked.

"I'm sorry," said Nell. "I'm so sorry. I can't. I can't be near—" Her eyes went to Valerian, and slid away. "I can't."

"It's all right," said Isolde.

"It isn't."

"No." She heard herself say it, gently, and was surprised at how little it hurt. "But go. You'll be safer. Keep your faces still."

They went. Posy looked back, once, from the door, with a small wild expression like a fox in a snare. Then the light took her.

Odile, in the second pew, said nothing at all. She had her arms wrapped tight round her knees. The woman with the baby's shawl had followed the Company without a word; Isolde had not even seen her stand. And that was all of them. A dozen survivors, reduced in an hour to one.

…

"I thought they would be afraid of me," said Valerian.

He was standing by the Harvest Queen, with the brass ear in his hand. He had picked it up from the flags and wiped it on his sleeve. His voice was perfectly steady. It was only that his gloved fingers, which were holding the key out to her, were trembling in a way he did not appear to notice.

"They were."

"I did not mean to—" He stopped. "I do not generally."

"Do you not?"

"I stand and watch." He met her eyes. "I do not generally put my hands to it. I should like you to know that."

She took the key. His glove brushed hers. It was cold.

"I know what I wrote," she said. "I know what I asked for."

"Do you regret it?"

She looked at the pile of cloth in the aisle, and the pin shining beside it. She thought of Posy's face. She thought of a gray-haired woman with a scarred mouth saying, You liked me.

"I regret that the world is made this way," said Isolde. "I don't regret that you were in it."

Something crossed his face. It was gone before she could name it.

He said, "You are going to make a poor Stray."

"I'm a very good Stray. I read."

"You are going to get yourself killed."

"Yes, probably." She turned to the Harvest Queen. "Odile, come here. Hold the lantern."

The mouth opened.

It opened with a sound like a seed splitting. The painted lips parted along the slit, as the key went in, and the red crescent that had been fixed in a smile for three hundred years curved down, and then up again, wider. There were teeth behind it. They were small and white and shaped like kernels of corn. The doll smiled at them with her whole wooden face, and the chapel began to come apart.

It peeled. The east wall bowed like paper in a fire and curled back from the edge, and through the gap came a gust of damp cold air that smelled of leaf mold and snow and resin. Trees stood there. Black trunks, standing close, climbing into a sky the color of ash. No path.

Ninth Cycle, thought Isolde.

She stood on the threshold with the wind in her hair, and the words went round and round in her head like a coin in a bowl. Ninth Cycle and you're still here. You really don't remember me. Whatever Maude Ferrier had meant, Valerian had not known it. She was sure of that. He had looked at the woman with blank gray eyes, and been struck by something he could not name.

She opened her mouth to ask.

"Come," said Valerian. "It will not hold."

The floor lurched. Odile grabbed her arm. The doll's smile was still widening, past the edge of her face, into the wood of her cheeks, and the cold from the forest was rising up the legs of her skirt.

She went through.